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ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT BUTLER 

AT THE 

OPENING EXERCISES OF THE 

ACADEMIC YEAR 

OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

SEPTEMBER 23, 1914 



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ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT BUTLER 

AT THE 

OPENING EXERCISES OF THE 

ACADEMIC YEAR 

OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

SEPTEMBER 23, 1914 

To each member of the University new or old, to 
the Scholares docentes and to the Scholares discentes, 
I give a hearty welcome on this opening day of the 
161st year of Columbia's long and honorable life. 

Our usual interests however great, our usual 
problems however pressing, all seem petty and 
insignificant in view of what has befallen the world 
while we were seeking rest and refreshment in the 
summer holiday. The murky clouds of cruel, relent- 
less war, lit by the lightning flash of great guns and 
made more terrible by the thunderous booming of 
cannon, hang over the European countries that we 
know and love so well. The great scholars that we 
would have so gladly welcomed here, have not come 
to us. They are killing and being killed across the 
sea. Friends and colleagues whom we honor are 
filled with hate toward each other, and toward each 
other's countrymen. The words that oftenest come 
to our lips, the ideals that we cherish and pursue, 
the progress that we fancied we were making, seem 
not to exist. Mankind is back in the primeval 
forest, with the elemental brute passions rinding a 
truly fiendish expression. The only apparent use 
of science is to enable men to kill other men more 
quickly and in greater numbers. The only apparent 
service of philosophy is to make the worse appear 

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the better reason. The only apparent evidence of 
the existence of religion is the fact that divergent 
and impious appeals to a palpably pagan God, have 
led him, in perplexed distress, to turn over the 
affairs of Europe to an active and singularly accom- 
plished devil. 

What are we to think ? Is science a sham ? Is 
philosophy a pretence? Is religion a mere rumor? 
Is the great international structure of friendship, 
good-will and scholarly cooperation upon which this 
University and many of its members have worked so 
long, so faithfully, and apparently with so much suc- 
cess, only an illusion ? Are the long and devoted 
labors of scholars and of statesmen to enthrone Justice 
in the place of Brute Force in the world, all without 
effect ? Are Lowell's lines true — 

Right forever on the scaffold, 

Wrong forever on the throne ? 

The answer is No ; a thousand times, No ! 

Despite all appearances, even in this wicked and 
causeless war which is decimating the flower of 
European manhood ; multiplying by the million the 
widows, the orphans, the suffering and distressed ; 
wrecking the commercial and industrial progress of 
a century ; impoverishing alike the belligerents and 
the neutrals ; closing the exchanges from New York 
to Buenos Aires ; ruining the cotton planter of the 
South as well as the copper miner of the far West ; 
recruiting an army of unemployed that will far out- 
number even the countless hosts of the fighting 
legions ; loosing in the frenzied combatants the 
primitive instincts for savagery and lust — even here 
there is to be found something on which this Uni- 
versity may continue to build the temple of wisdom, of 
justice and of true civilization to which its hand was 
laid when George II was king, when Louis XV still 

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reigned in France, and when Frederick the Great 
was at the height of his fame in Prussia. 

We are a neutral nation, and the President has 
rightly enjoined us all to observe neutrality in speech 
and in deed. But neutrality is not indifference : it is 
not the neutrality of the casual passer-by who views 
with amused carelessness a fight between two street 
rowdies ; it is the neutrality of the just judge who 
aims, without passion and without prejudice, to 
render judgment on the proved facts. We cannot 
if we would refrain from passing judgment upon the 
conduct of men whether singly or in nations, and we 
should not attempt to do so. 

In the first place, the moral judgment of the 
American people as to this war and as to the several 
steps in the declaration and conduct of it, is clear, 
calm, and practically unanimous. There is no beat- 
ing of drums and blowing of bugles, but rather a 
sad pain and grief that our kin across the sea, owing 
whatever allegiance and speaking whatever tongue, 
are engaged in public murder and destruction on the 
most stupendous scale recorded in history. This of 
itself proves that the education of public opinion 
has proceeded far, and, whatever the war-traders and 
militarists may say, that the heart of the American 
people is sound and its head well-informed. The 
attitude of the American press is worthy of the highest 
praise ; in some notable instances the very high-water 
mark of dignity and of power has been reached. 
When the war-clouds have lifted, I believe that the 
moral judgment of the American people as to this 
war will prove to be that of the sober-minded and 
fair-minded men in every country of Europe. 

Next, it must not be forgotten that this war was 
made by kings and by cabinets : it was not decreed 
by peoples. I can testify that the statement that 

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kings and cabinets were forced into the war by 
public sentiment, is absolutely untrue, so far at least 
as several of the belligerent nations are concerned. 
Certainly in not more than two cases were the 
chosen representatives of the people consulted at all. 
A tiny minority in each of several countries may 
have desired war, but the militarist spirit was sin- 
gularly lacking among the masses of the population. 
People generally have simply accepted with grim 
resignation and reluctant enthusiasm the conflict 
which in each case they are taught to believe has 
been forced on them by another's aggression. 

The most significant statement that I heard in 
Europe was made to me on the third day of August 
last by a German railway servant, a grizzled veteran 
of the Franco-Prussian war. In reply to my question 
as to whether he would have to go to the front, the 
old man said : " No ; I am too old. I am seventy- 
two. But my four boys went yesterday, God help 
them! and I hate to have them go." "For, Sir," 
he added in a lowered voice, " this is not a people's 
war ; it is a kings' war, and when it is over there 
may not be so many kings." 

Again, a final end has now been put to the conten- 
tion, always stupid and often insincere, that huge 
armaments are an insurance against war and an aid in 
maintaining peace. This argument was invented by 
the war-traders who had munitions of war to sell, 
and was nothing more than an advertisement for 
their business. Sundry politicians, many newspapers, 
and not a few good people who are proud to have 
their thinking done for them, accepted this adver- 
tisement as a profound political truth. Its falsity is 
now plain to every one. Guns and bullets and armor 
are not made to take the place of postage stamps 
and books and laboratories and other instruments of 

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civilization and of peace ; they are made to kill 
people. Since war is an affair of governments and 
of armies, one result of the present war should be to 
make the manufacture and sale of munitions of war, 
a government monopoly hereafter. This is a case 
where invasion of the field of liberty by government 
would do good, not harm. Then, too, the export of 
munitions of war from one country to another should 
be absolutely forbidden. When that happens, the 
taxpayer will be able to see just how his money is 
spent, and to check the expenditure, and the power- 
ful war-trader with his lines of influence in every 
parliament house and in every chancellery will be 
eliminated. 

It seems pretty clear that when the present huge 
supplies of guns and ammunition are used up in the 
contest now going on, no civilized people will ever 
again permit its government to enter into a competi- 
tive armament race. The time may not be so very 
far distant when to be the first moral power in the 
world will be a considerably greater distinction than 
to be the first military power or even the second 
naval power, which latter goal is so constantly and so 
subtly urged on the people of the United States. 
How any one, not fit subject for a mad-house, can 
find in the awful events now happening in Europe, 
a reason for increasing the military and naval estab- 
lishments and expenditures of the United States, is 
to me wholly inconceivable. 

Another great gain is to be found in the fact that 
no one is willing to be responsible for this war. 
Every combatant alleges that he is on the defensive, 
and summons his fellow countrymen who are scientists 
and philosophers to find some way to prove it. The 
old claim that war was a part of the moral order, a 
God-given instrument for the spreading of enlighten- 

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ment, and the only real training-school for the manly 
virtues, is just now in a state of eclipse. Each one 
of the several belligerent nations insists that it — and 
its government — are devoted friends of peace, and 
that it is at war only because war was forced upon it 
by the acts of some one else. As to who that some 
one else is, it has not yet been possible to get a 
unanimous agreement. What we do know is that no 
one steps forward to claim credit for the war or to 
ask a vote of thanks or a decoration for having forced 
it upon Europe and upon the world. Everybody 
concerned is ashamed of it and apologetic for it. 

It may well be, moreover, that the desperately 
practical and direct education which this war is 
affording will hasten very much the coming of the 
day when the close economic and intellectual inter- 
dependence of the nations will assert itself more 
emphatically and more successfully against national 
chauvinism and the preposterous tyranny of the 
militarists. The armed peace which preceded this 
war, and led directly to it, was in some respects worse 
than war itself ; for it had many of the evils of war 
without war's educational advantages. We are not 
likely to return again to that form of wickedness and 
folly, unless perchance the continent of Europe is able 
to produce another generation of public men as self- 
centred and of as narrow a vision as those who have 
generally been in control of public policy there for 
forty years past. The whole card-house of alliances 
and ententes, together with the balance of power 
theory, has come tumbling heavily to the ground. 
Something far different and much more rational will 
arise in its stead. In the Europe of tomorrow 
there will be no place for secret treaties and under- 
standings, for huge systems of armed camps and 
limitless navies, for sleepless international enmity 

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and treachery, for carefully stimulated race and 
religious hatred or for wars made on the sole responsi- 
bility of monarchs and of ministers. Moral, social 
and political progress will refuse longer to pay the 
crushing tolls which a conventional diplomacy and 
an unenlightened statesmanship have demanded of 
them. It is not the Slav or the Teuton, the Latin 
or the Briton, the Oriental or the American, who is 
the enemy of civilization and of culture. Militarism, 
there is the enemy ! 

The first notable victim of the Great War was the 
eloquent and accomplished French parliamentarian, 
M. Jaures. He was murdered by a war-crazed 
fanatic. In the course of a long and intimate con- 
versation with M. Jaures shortly before his tragic 
death, he dwelt much on the part that America could 
play in binding the nations of Europe together. He 
spoke of the success of the policies that had been 
worked out here to make the United States and 
Germany and the United States and France better 
known to each other, and he thought that through 
the agency of the United States it might eventually 
be practicable to draw Germany and France together 
in real trust and friendship. As we parted his last 
words to me were : " Do not leave off trying. No 
matter what the difficulties are, do not leave off 
trying." To-day the words of this great socialist 
leader of men, seem like a voice from beyond the 
grave. They are true. We must not leave off trying. 
When exhaustion, physical and economic, brings 
this war to an end, as I believe it will at no distant 
day, the task of America and Americans will be 
heavy and responsible. It will be for us to bind up 
the war's wounds, to soften the war's animosities, and 
to lead the way in the colossal work of reconstruction 
that must follow. Then if our heads are clear, our 

[9] 



hearts strong, and our aims unselfish — and if our 
nation continues to show that it means always to 
keep its own plighted word — we may gain new 
honor and imperishable fame for our country. We 
may yet live to see our great policies of peace, 
of freedom from entangling alliances, of a world 
concert instead of a continental balance of power, of 
an international judiciary and an international police, 
of international cooperation instead of international 
suspicion, generally assented to, and, as a result, 
the world's resources set free to improve the lot of 
peoples, to advance science and scholarship, and to 
raise humanity to a level yet unheard of. Here lies 
the path of national glory for us, and here is the call 
to action in the near future. 

It is often darkest just before the dawn, and the 
hope of mankind may lie in a direction other than 
that Europe toward which we are now looking so 
anxiously. Arthur Hugh Clough's noble verses are 
an inspiration to us at this hour : 

Say not the struggle nought availeth, 

The labour and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 

And as things have been, they remain. 

******* 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 

Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 

Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 



[10] 



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